Beijing: A report published by a human rights group claimed that the Chinese government has prevented thousands of people including foreigners from leaving the country. The Communist government is using the exit bans as tool to tighten controls under President Xi Jinping. Safeguard Defenders, a Spain based human rights group revealed this.
‘Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, China has expanded the legal landscape for exit bans and increasingly used them, sometimes outside legal justification. Exit bans have become one of the many tools used by the Chinese Communist Party as part of broad efforts to tighten control over all aspects of people’s lives,’ said the group in a report.
As per the report, since 2018, the Chinese government have passed 5 new or amended laws expanding its ability to impose so-called exit bans, bringing the total to 15. Between 2016 and 2020, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of cases where exit bans were mentioned in the Chinese Supreme Court’s legal database.
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The group claimed that the government is using exit bans to ‘punish human rights defenders and their families, hold people hostage to force targets overseas to come back to China, control ethnic-religious groups, engage in hostage diplomacy and intimidate foreign journalists.’
In April, China amended its Counter-espionage Law, allowing for exit bans on anyone under investigation, or on Chinese nationals if deemed a potential national security risk after leaving the country.
‘In the absence of transparent official data and excluding ethnicity-based exit bans, which number in the millions, we estimate that at least tens of thousands of people in China are placed on exit bans at any one time. Many of these exit bans are illegitimate and violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ principle of Freedom of Movement,’ notes the Safeguard Defenders report.
A study published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Thunderbird International Business Review found 128 cases of foreigners being exit-banned between 1995 and 2019, including 29 Americans and 44 Canadians. During that same period, at least 41 foreign businesspeople were subjected to exit bans.
‘In some cases, the targeting of foreigners is part of Beijing’s hostage diplomacy, a tit-for-tat retaliation aimed at a foreign government or a tactic to extract concessions,’ the report notes.
The report also claims that the Chinese government is using exit bans to compel individuals to participate in PRC government investigations, pressure family members of the restricted individual to return to the PRC from abroad, resolve civil disputes in favour of PRC citizens, and gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments.
Citing a Chinese judicial report, Safeguard Defenders says at least 34,000 people were also placed under exit bans between 2016 and 2018 for owing money. This reported a 55% rise from the same period three years earlier.
China’s President Xi Jinping is also reported to be using exit bans to target foreign journalists, with at least four known cases of foreign journalists being targeted, or threatened with, exit bans since 2018.
‘At a time when China is proactively trying to restore business confidence to attract foreign investment, the exit bans send a very mixed signal,’ the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China told Reuters in a statement.
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